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Innovation promises great leaps forward. It offers hopeful and seemingly wondrous shortcuts and economies to everything it touches. It’s a new way, maybe audaciously conceived, and often tricky to execute. It’s also a fundamental pedestal for all we do. And many of us, if we are perseverant and lucky, are actually in the business of being innovative. But innovation always faces initial rejection. It’s just part of the deal.

There’s the promise of dramatic improvement, the skepticism, disappointment and persistence that we find so addicting. So I think it’s worth the time dissecting that process a bit, so we can all benefit a bit more from understanding the inventor, while bringing ourselves forward in ways we can apply to our professional and personal lives.

Great Leaps and Incremental Improvements

I recently read an article that proclaimed a requirement to call something an innovation is a 10x improvement in a process, expense or service. I rather like the idea of putting a numerical value on innovation, as it sets a target standard to be aiming for. I can ask, does my product provide that 10x improvement? That’s a demanding figure! However I don’t think you can discount innovation that isn’t as startling.

Some innovations, think of the printing press and more recently the internet, offer astronomical gains in productivity and information access across society. Going to the library to research has become a quaint activity, with power usurped from librarians everywhere. The internet becomes our personal assistant, advertising vehicle and even a translator. That doesn’t mean incremental improvements aren’t important either. Actually, I think the two are implicitly married, and that one doesn’t persist towards adoption without the other. Broadly applied innovation has an ecosystem of technologies, users and materials. For example, improvements in virus protection probably don’t have a 10x multiplier on internet use, but they do have a cumulative effect on browsing behavior of the people who adapt that protection. Think of the distinction in terms of game changing, and solving serious pitfalls. Both are important to success and adaptation.

Now it also seems that with innovation, you also necessarily encounter a sociological refusal that I’m saying you must overcome to be optimally successful. An example from my mid 90’s past we’d consider small minded now is needing to lobby a particular VP to grant internet access to sales people to help them research customers sites. The establishment fear was that people would spend all day surfing inappropriate sites that would take away from productivity. I can’t imagine an information technology company in that science-focused business applying that same reasoning any longer.

People, particularly from my generation or older, discount social media and blogging, but it’s actually a fairly effective and potent form of circulating news – yes many may not want all the minutia that comes with it, but it can be used quite powerfully and personally when used well.

In a more pedestrian example, I often hear about how code analysis tools won’t work, particularly applied to internationalization, even when there’s apparent proof in project and customer success that they do. I consider it a badge of honor that a leading localization company featured in their blog how internationalization tools are a myth. They all but called out my company’s product by name.  Yet an open mind and some actual research or even a phone call would have shown more of an embrace of the possibility of improvements that actually help the whole industry. People are all too happy to kill off innovation without a serious thought or investigation based on their experiences in the past. In other words, past attempts were unsuccessful before, so we’ll assume nothing could have changed. The blog post even sited products that have been extinct for years as evidence. Small example but this is how reactionary thinking plays out in management efforts that can potentially be damaging in an information industry routed in advancing technologies and development methods.

Where Innovation Comes From

I haven’t noticed a clear path to an innovation process, but what I do know is that ideas are common, good ideas are rare and good ideas followed with action are rarer still. A dynamic individual may have or come across what many would feel is a good idea, about 4 to 8 times per year – some people much more, some less. Ideas are always fun and exciting to me, but I confess to only following up on a few. The rest of creativity goes into tweaking current projects, or reading and learning and bringing those ideas into everyday activities.

Since there isn’t really any value in a creative or innovative idea without follow-through, there is nothing wrong and everything to gain by running with someone else’s innovative idea or improvement. You just have to keep an open mind to where it may come from.

Big ideas can come from the top down or bottom up. But incremental improvements more typically come from your everyday users or developers living with a product every day.

For instance, an ongoing challenge for us in our Globalyzer product, is that when our clients first apply it to perform static analysis on their code, they often end up with what we refer to as false positive results. That is, the product will flag internationalization errors, and in particular embedded strings, which may be programmatic elements such as debug statements or database queries. We developed rules based filters and a back end database to minimize, catch and tag them, but they typically need some adaptation and customization for each code base. That’s fine and to be expected and managed, and even a strength of the system, but what if there was another way?

And in fact a Jr. Programmer/intern working at my company doing a lot of code scanning for service projects made a simple remark, “what if we compared those strings to an actual dictionary? That would tell us quite a bit about the nature of the string just based on content, rather than programmatic rules.” It was a very good idea and one of our architects adapted it to make it real. By the time you are reading this, this improvement will have been released in our software. The young programmer is back in school and has moved on, but his good idea is about to become a real part of our product.

Innovation Devalues Everything it Touches

By its very nature, innovation puts either a person or process out of work. It wouldn’t be worth anything if it didn’t make someone more productive with less. At the same time, the first rounds of innovation are typically full of pitfalls that need to be overcome.

The immediate case that comes to mind is the current brouhaha over crowdsourcing. In case you haven’t attended LocalizationWorld,  read up on industry happenings, or participated in numerous LinkedIn discussions, Crowdsourcing is either a great evil or the most innovative thing that’s happened in our industry in a while, or something in between. There are complaints about the very concept, the devaluing of translator expertise and what some people feel is an inferior end result produced by enthusiastic, but naive, volunteers willing to work for accolades alone. Others, notably at Facebook, feel it’s a process that results in faster, cheaper translations at a higher quality. It’s not hard to find evidence supporting both sides, and I suppose at the moment final judgment on immediate results may not be the relevant criteria. More likely the industry could potentially have something to gain using the technologies for rendering translations in context with application pages, rather than the contextless traditional table view. These tools can be applied to more traditional translation resources, while also gaining a better linguistic review platform and buy-in from in-country clients and employees – who are after all, the real stakeholders and judges in a localization effort. But that’s just my understanding of it, and I may be overlooking something. Certainly there’s a long way to go, but I wouldn’t be caught on the side of belittling the persistent follow-through of dedicated people bringing ideas into reality and adding enhancements to overcome pitfalls.

BOULDER, CO – January 7, 2010 – Lingoport, a leading provider of software internationalization tools for software localization and internationalization consulting services, announced today the release of Globalyzer 3.2.

Lingoport’s software internationalization tool assists entire enterprises in preparing software development for world-market opportunities. Key-features include static analysis of source code for the measurement, reporting, and fixing of software internationalization bugs over a product’s lifecycle, across broad development teams and entire enterprises. Globalyzer supports a wide variety of programming languages and database scripts.

The key highlights of the 3.2 release include:

• Dictionary-based filtering: Compares strings found to dictionary entries, which helps further filter programmatic strings that should not be translated. This is particularly effective in isolating embedded strings for localization, while reducing the effort of user-based filter controls to avoid false positive reporting.
• Reporting Enhancement: With all the ways that one can fine tune Globalyzer detection and filtering, we expanded Globalyzer reports to include information on filtering and detection choices associated with individual results. This helps developers track and adapt which filters and detection algorithms and customizations are producing specific results during internationalization source code scans.

Adam Asnes, founder and CEO of Lingoport, notes, “We are particularly excited about dictionary filtering because it provides a very creative and effective way to get Globalyzer users strong detection results while minimizing project customization.” He adds, “This feature is particularly effective for programming languages like C and C++, but also applies well to .NET and Java.”

To register for a free Globalyzer trial, please visit: http://globalyzer.com/gi/companyRegistration.jsp

To learn more about Globalyzer, visit http://lingoport.com/globalyzer

About Lingoport

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize source code and to prepare applications for localization.

For more information, please visit http://lingoport.com or http://globalyzer.com or contact Lingoport at +1 303 444 8020 or info@lingoport.com.

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Though this internationalization webinar occurred in the past, we have a recording available at no charge. Please complete registration form to receive link to this video.

Internationalization efforts are often costly, highly iterative, late and incomplete. Internationalization release requirements can fall significantly behind new functionality and localization entropy ensues. Agile release schedules put more emphasis than ever on building i18n into coding practices. At the same time, many companies are enjoying 60% and more of their revenues or significant growth outside their home markets.

Besides the time consuming process of verifying internationalization, it’s very difficult to hit all the likely internationalization test cases that will be needed. That undermines the very expense and effort of performing localization to reach new clients. Using Globalyzer to analyze and fix issues at the source code level minimizes costly testing and fixing cycles during localization. Plus it just makes internationalization go faster, whether you have a big i18n effort ahead, or a new release that needs checking.

In this webinar we will:

• Discuss the process of static analysis for internationalization issues
• Show how it’s a lot more efficient to search and internationalize code using Globalyzer than poking and picking your way through with scripts, eyeballs and testing
• Work with some sample open source code
• Discuss False Positive and False Negative results and how to manage them
• Introduce rule sets and dictionary comparisons for pinpointing i18n issues
• Show results with filtering and without on large scale projects
• Show how you can automatically audit code and track new development for i18n issues

Who should attend:

• Development Managers
• Technical Managers
• Developers
• Localization Managers and Engineers

In our services effort we’ve been using Globalyzer to get excellent intelligence on internationalization issues, step through them and fix them. We’ve spent a great deal of development effort in the past year to bring about a major new release and two follow-up releases, so that we can bring this system out to you and your teams, and analyze and fix code for internationalization issues without all the usual  costly iterations and delays.

While we’ve been bringing this message out broadly this year, there’s quite a bit of initial skepticism on applying Globalyzer and getting valuable results, as opposed to getting deluged by false reporting. So in this webinar, we’re going to show you how we get our work done.

Please complete the following form, and you will be contacted by a Lingoport representative with the URL for the streaming video of this webinar.

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One-Hour Online Presentation Outlines the Process for Improving Internationalization in Order to Reduce Programming, Testing, and Process Iterations during the Localization Phase

BOULDER, CO – October 29, 2009 – Lingoport, a leading provider of software internationalization tools and software localization and internationalization consulting services, announced today that it will host a live webinar, on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 9:00 am – 10:00 am PDT, to discuss the ROI for I18n processes and tools.

In this interactive Webinar, Lingoport CEO Adam Asnes and Lori Cameron, Vice President of Engineering at Lingoport, will demonstrate the software internationalization process and how software internationalization tools, such as Globalyzer, assist this process.

Webinar: “Internationalization ROI Improvement Using I18n Tools”

Date: Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Time: 9:00 am – 10:00 am PDT

Where: Your desktop

Register at: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/208597347

Cost: Complimentary

Presenters: Adam Asnes and Lori Cameron of Lingoport

The presentation features a case study on how to take on an I18n project, assuming a substantial software application with multiple programming languages. Additional topics discussions include:

• Internationalization basics
• Traditional approaches to a software internationalization effort
• I18n tools
• A detailed spreadsheet illustrating where your money is going and how to reduce I18n spending
• The impact of ongoing internationalization on subsequent localization spending

Adam Asnes, founder and CEO of Lingoport, notes, “Our customers frequently ask us to help them illustrate the ROI for improving internationalization. To that end, we present a study on how to occur less programming, testing and process iterations during the software localization phase in this Webinar.”

This Webinar targets internationalization and localization decision makers and anyone facing ongoing software globalization and localization challenges, including: technical managers, software engineers, engineering managers, internationalization and localization managers, project managers, product managers, and international marketing managers.

Interested attendees from Asia that are not able to attend this session are encouraged to contact Lingoport by email at webinar@lingoport.com to inquire about upcoming Webinar times.

About Lingoport

Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information, please visit http://lingoport.com or http://globalyzer.com or contact Lingoport at +1 303 444 8020 or info@lingoport.com.

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Internationalization ROI

It’s easy to get agreement that revenues beyond a company’s home country market are important. If you look at some of the great global US brands, you’ll find that global revenues are 50% or even greater than 65% of their gross. While much has been made of measuring the return on investment for localizing software, what about measuring the very process of making software which is internationalized so that it can be localized and supported worldwide?

There are lots of issues to measure, and they vary in emphasis for the company which is making its first efforts outside its home market, to companies that have highly evolved processes for global releases.

First we must consider opportunity costs, backing up marketing and sales efforts, competitive pressures and right down to cost of engineering. Now typically ROI calculations get down to hours saved at a particular rate, which is certainly valuable information and usually those numbers are paramount to analyzing any kind of process changes. But if a company is making new efforts or experiencing painful delays in global releases, opportunity costs and major market factors are deal makers and the stuff that executive level directives are made of.

Internationalize or Die

This heading may sound dramatic, but it’s quite the case for some of our clients. For instance, we have a client whose software platform is used by third parties in e-commerce efforts. Many of their accounts are well recognized names in retail and merchandising, who are beginning to look at markets outside the US as important to their brands. While our client is not interested in purchasing localization themselves, if they can’t make their product support data management and presentation in multiple languages and locale sensitive formats, they will lose their customers to competitors. I asked their senior management what was at stake, and they replied nothing less than their company’s future growth and survival. Given that this a billion dollar company, I’d say that’s a pretty big opportunity cost ROI on an linternationalization effort.

Opportunity Costs

Internationalization happens because it’s first and foremost a business driver. I have yet to meet the development team that decides to internationalize just because it would be an interesting task. So I think it’s appropriate to first consider business drivers outside of the development process itself.

Perhaps global sales efforts have been taking place with a US English product. Outside of development, there are costs of sales, marketing personnel, supporting distributors, legal and administrative costs to name a few. These all have expensive price tags, which are independent of having an internationalized and localized product. And an internationalized and localized product has been shown to make those representative costs far more effective at producing revenue.

Cost of Delays

In an earlier article and subsequent whitepaper on our site, I outlined the cost of being late. The quick summary is that the marketing team will typically have projected revenues for each market, but dependent upon release criteria. If a product is a single quarter late, which is not bad for a large project for some software development teams, they just lost a quarter of their year for the sales teams to meet those projections. What’s the value of one quarter of sales effort? If those sales efforts are expected to produce increased results over time, how does that roll out and effect market penetration in future years? While these are broadly variable scenarios, I always like to consider the “top end” revenue implications before beginning to count development hour savings. The top end always has far broader consequences and those opportunity costs get very real with numbers followed by many zeros in a competitive world.

Cutting Development Costs

My company, Lingoport, has just released Globalyzer 3.0 which is aimed squarely at supporting entire development organizations. It’s actually the only commercial system of its nature, purpose built to support a very broad list of programming languages, measuring, filtering, reporting, tracking and even fixing internationalization issues over the development processes via its client, server and database components. Companies have products to measure coding quality, security issues, memory management and more. Now we are adding static analysis of internationalization to the source code development process. Remember, if so much revenue is riding on global markets, doesn’t it make sense to actively measure and aid software globalization issues, just as much as software security issues? Why not check source for embedded strings, locale-limiting methods/functions and classes, Unicode compliance, Font issues, i18n limiting programming patterns and the like at regular automated intervals rather than waiting until QA or localization? Remember the management principal that if you want to improve anything, measure, track and report it as close to its creation as possible. What gets measured gets done.

Cost per I18n Bug – Case study with mature localization practices

In working with a new client, which is already quite mature in their localization and internationalization efforts, we had the opportunity to get actual ROI data, based on real internationalization bug fixing costs they had measured over 60 localized products. After cleansing that information of confidential data, they gave me permission to share it though limiting the data to results from 17 products.

Traditionally, they have been finding internationalization bugs during internal and external localization QA testing efforts, including both Psuedo-Localization (creating fake translations for testing purposes) and actual localization testing performed by both their organization and vendors. They counted five organizations touched by internationalization errors: Localization Vendor QA, Localization Project Management, Internal Localization QA, Product Development QA and Core Engineering. The process goes something like this:

1. Internationalization bug is discovered and reported during Localization
2. Project Manager tracks the bug, may enter or flag it in a bug tracking
   system
3. Core Engineering, which likely has moved on to other efforts by
   now, must assign and fix the bug
4. Product Development QA must verify the
   fix and any other issues the fix may have affected
5. Additional Localization
   efforts may need to be made for the same issue

This iterative process gets pretty expensive. Remember that a maxim for software development is that the earlier you find and fix bugs, the less expensive. Fix a bug before a QA cycle, and you save multiple people having to process that bug in some way, and retest the solution. Need to fix a bug after release? Costs get much worse. This principal is a major contributor to the popularity of moving to agile development cycles, so that you enhancing and verifying software in smaller, successful, less expensive cycles.

Our client figured on an average of 25 internationalization issue bugs per release, an average of 10 hours spent cumulatively by the five groups per bug , with an average of 60 releases per year over these 17 products. Some products had zero i18n bugs reported, others had over 100. The business case for finding internationalization issues in source code as part of regular automated processes integrated into their build cycle gets very clear at this level. They estimated savings of $420,000 per year, just on reducing localization QA costs. By finding the issues early, total product development savings were calculated to be over $760,000 per year.

Remember that even maturely localized products, still have regular new release cycles, which in turn create the potential for new internationalization issues. Product Development never really stops, and teams tend to be more broadly geographically distributed than ever before. That makes measurement tools all the more valuable for localization savvy companies.

Cost per I18n Bug – Case study, product has never been localized

When you consider companies engaging in early globalization efforts, the payback simply multiplies per product as you can expect the i18n bug count to go way up. Without a tools-based approach to finding and fixing issues, internationalization will be very heavily trial and error iterative. One can write a few scripts which will take considerable time, research and effort, and still likely produce unreliable results. Then you can pseudo-localize display strings after you’ve found as many as you can and externalized, or populate the database with target encoding data. You would then test, test and test again while you had to hunt down the issues one by one in the source. This only multiplies the cost per i18n bug. By finding issues first at the source level, you can actually begin to orchestrate their correction, tying directly to that issues precise location within hundreds of thousands, or even millions of lines of code. And that’s an intelligent way to find and remove a needle in a haystack.

The table below illustrates the costs of i18n bug iterations for a single product of about 500,000 lines of code during the first internationalization effort. This table doesn’t include additional costs of researching and implementing various scripts and homemade utilities to help the work get done. It also doesn’t take into account that a tool like ours actually isolates i18n issues, pinpointing them in source, while also facilitating batch externalization of strings – both very tedious and time consuming activities. Consider that even a simple error message that gets missed using traditional scripts and trial and error, may not show up at best during late QA efforts that force the error to appear, or worse, after product release. We commonly hear that it takes three or four localization releases to weed out those sorts of issues that get missed so easily. That is why this table lists a higher i18n bug rate for 2 subsequent releases than the table used for the localization mature company earlier in this article.

Pitfalls and Adjustments

I think it’s fair to say that no tool offers a panacea. The strike against coding quality checkers in general has been complaints about over reporting errors, often referred to as false positives. It’s true that if you overload a developer on data that is only partially relevant, that data risks being ignored. That is why any enterprise scalable solution must include dynamic ways to filter results, share those filter controls and track them over time. You also must have flexible detection, so that you can add unique parameters that invariably crop up and can be quite particular to a specific code base.

New processes may not be greeted with enthusiasm by development teams which are typically already over tasked and under-resourced, so it’s important to help them understand the meaningfulness of getting global releases out faster and with higher quality. Automating code checking and reporting during a regular process like a periodic build is an excellent way to track and highlight progress.

Business Case

While this article mostly covers issues regarding site creation and adaptation, any discussion must include the business drivers as they strongly impact cost and time considerations.

Whether you work at a large or small company, your business case leads your budget and resource allocation in creating sites for global audiences. In most cases, this globalization strategy involves high level management visibility and strategic commitment. There are revenue expectations, distribution issues to sort out, possibly local in-country representation to support and a host of other logistics. All that adds up to plenty of expectations for a return on the investment. Getting a good plan in place, including a strong understanding of the scope of implementation efforts, a technical and process roadmap, as well as some kind of measurement metrics helps you get the right funding and resources to be successful.

The costs of poorly globalizing your e-commerce site certainly include building expensive systems that don’t have the needed functionality for an international customer base. Even worse are the delays in deployment that have rather painful and visible effects on your company’s revenue stream, global aspiration objectives, and ultimately the bottom line.

Process Steps in Creating a Global Site

In creating a site adapted to worldwide customers, there are two major defined steps: Internationalization and Localization. For a site to be localized, giving it the “look and feel” of having been developed in the target market, it must first be internationalized.

Internationalization
– one site, many adaptations

To the outside observer, internationalization (i18n) remains a hidden and often unknown attribute, but it is critical to leveraging your success from market to market. When you internationalize your site, you adapt its technology to be capable of not only supporting any language, but also supporting local formats and ways of doing business. Translators and regional stakeholders can alter content and more, but the site itself – what presents and processes information – remains consistent and leveraged for each market.

We often counsel our clients to think in terms of locales, and not languages. That’s because you can’t assign local purchasing behaviors to a language. It’s more of the other way around; a locale includes the language of the region as well as numerous other issues, ranging from character set support, date/time formatting, forms of payment, data/product sorting, phone/address formatting and more.

If you are using another company’s e-commerce platform technology for your site, then you must find out exactly how they support internationalization. If you are building a new site, be aware that some technologies adapt to internationalization and localization demands better than others. The technologies you choose should tread the balance of your current organization requirements and your business objectives.

If you are adapting your current site to support internationalization, consider these areas in your migration:

Architecture – The structure of your e-commerce system, including the software itself, the externally visible properties of the user interface, and the relationships between them.

• Consider your new requirements for international markets, finding the balance of what is not in your e-commerce site that needs to be added
• Likewise, examine what is in your site’s code that needs to be changed to support the markets.

Code refactoring – Unless you are developing a new e-commerce site where support for international markets is planned from the beginning, it is likely that the internal structure of your e-commerce site will require modification to improve or change the code to better support international functionality. Typical code refactoring on internationalization projects includes:

• Extract embedded strings from the code so that they can be easily accessed for translation
• Changing locale-limiting functions, methods and classes
• Mark relevant business logic object-based so that can be affected by locale requirements
• Enable character set support (Unicode) so that extended characters display properly
• Ensure character encoding changes to pages, database and individual coding elements are implemented
• Abstract transaction workflow on the site that may need to be dynamically customized to support locale requirements

It can be a challenge to identify and fix internationalization issues in an e-commerce Web site application. Fortunately, there is at least one tool that greatly facilitates the process. Globalyzer, a product available from Lingoport, is built to help teams of developers find and fix internationalization issues, and keep software internationalized over time. You can learn more on the Lingoport
web site and even sign up for a trial Globalyzer account.

Content Management Systems

Another aspect to take into account during the internationalization phase is the type of tools you are using for developing your content. For Web sites, there are plenty of good content management systems (CMS) that are available; however, there are differences among them that affect the support for international markets. If you use one, you want make sure it is localization-friendly. It must have a way to export the translatable content in some kind of file format that translation tools can use. XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) or other variations of XML-based formats are good choices. The tool must also be able to merge back the translated exported data into the right places in the localized content.

The capability to generate “delta” files – which contain only the content “chunks” that need to go through the localization process for translation – is a very efficient way to reduce the costs for localizing updates as your site is modified. It is often helpful to the linguists, though, to provide reference materials or to include the already-translated content around the new translatable chunks, so the translation can be done within a meaningful context.

Some content management systems also allow you to control the granularity of the chunks you create, and to re-use them across the whole published Web site. This allows for even more cost saving in localization.

Content creation

Whether you are using a content management system or not, how you write the content and design your icons and graphics affects the ultimate localizability of the site. Taking into consideration the way the content is developed saves money during the localization process and results in better international sites. Ultimately, it is much cheaper to create content correctly in the source language before translating the content into many languages for the target markets and having to address content issues for each market:

• Write in simplified English. In creating the source content, write in the active voice, avoiding complex sentence structures. Avoid the use of slang, colloquial expressions, and cultural references. This is even more important if you anticipate having some users from markets that are not covered by your globalization plan. They may end up using machine translation engines to get a gist of the content of your Web site.
• Reuse text. If you say the same thing at different places, say it the same way, so the translation of the first occurrence can be used for the second one. This leveraging of text can significantly reduce the linguistic fees through the reuse of previously translated content. By all means, avoid minor wording changes as that just means more costs. Content management systems can help you to parse your content into “chunks” that are easily translated while facilitating the reuse of content throughout the site.
• Icons. Make sure all icons are understandable by your target markets. It is cheaper to have icons that “work everywhere” than to customize icons for each market. Identifying culturally acceptable icons can require a bit of up-front cost in assessing them for your target markets, but it avoids confusing (or worse, offending) your customers. Alternatively, you can design your Web site to easily substitute icons according to the market (e.g. by using style-sheets instead of hard-coding style changes in your pages).
• Graphics. While it is tempting to have complex graphics with layered text, remember that all text has to be translated. Translating text that is embedded into graphics is more expensive. If you have to use call outs on your graphics, use numbers or letters that are then referenced in the text of the page rather than on the graphic itself. Whatever you do, make sure that you keep the graphic source files for your localization team (not just the collapsed JPG or GIF files).
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In creating the source e-commerce site, great care is taken to optimize search terms so that the site appears readily in search engine matches. Extend your efforts to include SEO for each of your target markets, using appropriate search terms in the metadata as well as the content itself.

Ensuring Internationalization Success

A good internationalization effort should be validated with a careful review of the source site:

• Consider using pseudo-translation (where the content is passed through a small program to convert the text into extended characters so that display can be verified) of the content to verify that all modifiable elements of the site are indeed accessible and can be changed for the various translated versions. Verify that locale-sensitive data can be processed accordingly (date/time/numbers format, currency issues, measurement units, etc.) and that, when needed, locale-specific content can be provided as well (end-user license agreements, privacy and confidentiality statements, 800-type numbers, part numbers, etc..)

Success of your site on the international scene comes from a combination
of:

• Good development practices
• Well-adapted tools used during the development
  and the maintenance of the site, and
• Content that is ready for localization,
  taking into account cultural differences as appropriate.

By following these high-level guidelines, you are better prepared for the localization and translation of your e-commerce site for each of your target markets.

BOULDER, CO – September 22, 2009 – Lingoport, a leading provider of software internationalization tools and software localization and internationalization consulting services, announced today the release of Globalyzer 3.1.

Lingoport’s software internationalization tool assists entire enterprises in preparing software development for world-market opportunities. Key-features include the measurement, reporting, and fixing of software internationalization bugs over a product’s lifecycle, across broad development teams and entire enterprises. The software internationalization tool supports a wide variety of programming languages and database scripts and was beta-tested by several leading business software development companies.

The key highlights of the 3.1 release include:

File Inspector: This entirely new feature allows for initial code-scanning
in order to get an inventory of files and programming languages within a software
application. This new utility provides help on what default rule sets to create
on the server, in order to optimize the initial software internationalization
efforts.

Improved Default Rule Sets: The enhancement of the defaults allows for an
improved initial code scanning experience in order to find relevant issues,
thus being able to identify issues that wouldn’t be part of an interface (also
referred to as false positives).

JavaScript Support Enhancements: Improved JavaScript support
added Unsafe Method support to the default JavaScript rule set as well as string
externalization to .JS resource files.

Globalyzer Client-Server Rule Set Integration: The addition of auto updating
to the Globalyzer client enables users to immediately recognize changes that
were made within the Globalyzer server account rule sets, without the need
to restart the client-server connection.

Adam Asnes, founder and CEO of Lingoport, notes, “Other areas of improvements
include a new XML output style (Java Standard) and enhanced formatted reporting
and some changes on the parser/lexing level.” He adds, “We are very excited
to offer our customers to reach better results, more easily with this release.”

To register for a free Globalyzer trial, please visit: http://globalyzer.com/gi/companyRegistration.jsp

About Lingoport
Founded in 2001, Lingoport provides extensive software localization and internationalization
consulting services. Lingoport’s Globalyzer software, a market leading software internationalization tool, helps entire enterprises and development teams to effectively internationalize existing code and to prepare their applications for localization.

For more information, please visit http://lingoport.com or http://globalyzer.com or contact Lingoport at +1 303 444 8020 or info@lingoport.com.

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Though this internationalization webinar occurred in the past, we have a recording available at no charge. Please complete registration form to receive link to this video.

Figuring out where your engineering dollars go, while optimizing processes and seeing their effect on the bottom line is a very difficult exercise. However we receive requests from over half our clients to help illustrate the ROI for improving internationalization so there is far less programming, testing and process iterations during localization. To that end, we present a study in applied internationalization experience, and true costs of finding and fixing internationalization issues in code.

Free Webinar: Internationalization ROI improvement using i18n tools

In this one-hour Webinar, we will discuss and illustrate how internationalization gets done and how Globalyzer optimizes the process. We’ll look at real dollars and hours involved in taking on an internationalization project assuming a substantial software application with multiple programming languages.

We’ll be covering Internationalization:

• Basics
• Traditional approaches to a software internationalization effort
• Tools to get the job done faster
• A very detailed spreadsheet showing where your money is going and how to keep much more of it!
• Examining how ongoing internationalization also affects your localization ROI costs

This webinar is being hosted by Lingoport and direct clients as well as localization partners are absolutely welcome.

We are also considering offering an additional presentation for a time optimized for attendees in Asia. This will be on an interest basis, so if you would be interested, please email us to let us know.

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In this one-hour Webinar recording, internationalization and localization experts Adam Asnes of Lingoport and Jon Ritzdorf of Acclaro will discuss how internationalization supports the adaptation of a product for a particular market locale (known as “localization”) and how to proceed quickly, efficiently and at a controlled, predictable cost.

We’ll be covering Internationalization:

• Basics
• Project Scoping
• Tools to get the job done faster

And best practices for localization:

• Resource formats
• Linguistic construction of strings
• User interface issues

Presenters are Adam Asnes. President and CEO of Lingoport, and Jon Ritzdorf, who is a very well versed and talented localization technology advisor at Acclaro.Please the complete registration form below , and you will be contacted by a Lingoport representative with the URL for the streaming video of this webinar:

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